recently took on maintainership of kicker since it was in need. there's now a HACKING file and the start of a DESIGN file. patches are welcome and will be quickly processed; please follow the style in the HACKING document, of course. =) i've been working on three things in particular: taskbar, smooth icon zooming and getting rid of the hardcoded panel. Panel::the() is nearly gone on my machine at work; the icon zooming is now in its third revision and, while buggy, at least stable; a lot of optimization work and some feature additions have been done. with all this happening, kicker really needs testing. please bug me by email about any regressions. anybody looking to get into kicker hacking is welcome to pester me as well ;-)
now... is it just me, or are there way too many people writing about things in Open Source that they just have no idea about? i mean, i have opinions on the space programs of various nations, sure. but you don't see me writing articles in nasaobserveronline.com offering critique and advice on how the space shuttle should be engineered. i feel that if you don't have the qualifications to actually do the work you are "analyzing" then don't analyze it because you'll almost certainly be wrong. many of our current herd of pundits love to editorialize on all sorts of topics they are not even remotely involved with and, even more astonishingly, they will argue against those who are both qualified and involved (and who usually lack soapboxes of equal statue since they're busy DOING things). having opinions is a fine thing, don't get me wrong; but sharing them from a position of self-made authority when you lack any claim to such authority is just wrong.
why do i care? because it slows us down, causes strife and friction where there need be none and sometimes even causes well-intentioned people to chase white rabbits down blind alleys. this doesn't help us in the least.
the written word is a powerful thing and should be used with responsibility and respect. if you aren't qualified in the topic you are writing about, then just report the facts and keep the editorializing for the airmchair in the den.
in other news, i'm considering taking a sabatical of some sort next year so as to work on KDE concertedly for a few months. i want to be able to concentrate on some KDE4 things. financing it will require some creativity, but i think it's doable.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Post a Comment